Only foolish werewolves believe that they can win the war against the Wyrm in the physical world alone. Some use the Penumbra as a shortcut, a staging ground, or as a way to set traps for spiritually-aware foes. Others take Moon Bridges to the Realms of the Near Umbra, seeking powerful spirit magics or a concentration of the Wyrm’s forces headed to attack Gaia. Some cross into different spirit worlds again, hoping to find some undiscovered lore that might turn the tide in their favor. And a few werewolves whisper of the existence of creatures blessed by Gaia herself, giving of Herself to stave off the Wyrm’s corruption.

The World’s Reflection

This book presents the spirit world of the Umbra as seen and understood by the Garou and their fellow shapeshifters, providing players and Storytellers both with new information about the various spirit worlds. It includes a detailed look at the animistic Umbra as the werewolves know it, with new information on the Penumbra and the Realms. Storytellers can use the information on the Astral and Dark Umbrae — in both the Penumbra and the spirit world itself — to present unfamiliar spirit worlds that bring new challenges to the Garou. The book also contains details on the Kami, creatures and places possessed by the energies of Gaia herself.

Umbra: Velvet Shadow contains:

A detailed look at the Penumbra, the major Realms of the Near Umbra, and the Astral and Dark Umbrae.

New information on the animistic spirits of the Near Umbra, including plenty of new spirits to liven up the spirit world.

New lore and systems for the Kami, chosen of Gaia, and a host of example chosen.

Note on the Print Editions: Standard Color uses a thinner paper stock than Premium Color, basically the same paper as the Black & White books. This usually means the colors are less vivid, but it also means the price drops a bit per page in the production process.

These products were created by scanning an original printed edition. Most older books are in scanned image format because original digital layout files never existed or were no longer available from the publisher.

For PDF download editions, each page has been run through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to attempt to decipher the printed text. The result of this OCR process is placed invisibly behind the picture of each scanned page, to allow for text searching. However, any text in a given book set on a graphical background or in handwritten fonts would most likely not be picked up by the OCR software, and is therefore not searchable. Also, a few larger books may be resampled to fit into the system, and may not have this searchable text background.

For printed books, we have performed high-resolution scans of an original hardcopy of the book. We essentially digitally re-master the book. Unfortunately, the resulting quality of these books is not as high. It's the problem of making a copy of a copy. The text is fine for reading, but illustration work starts to run dark, pixellating and/or losing shades of grey. Moiré patterns may develop in photos. We mark clearly which print titles come from scanned image books so that you can make an informed purchase decision about the quality of what you will receive.

Original electronic format

These ebooks were created from the original electronic layout files, and therefore are fully text searchable. Also, their file size tends to be smaller than scanned image books. Most newer books are in the original electronic format. Both download and print editions of such books should be high quality.